Recently I had a number of "drive busy's" on a couple projects. They were recorded in MTP, at 44.1. There are about 23 or 24 tracks playing, and the error occurred while punching a single record track of vocals using AutoPunch. It happened several times, so I copied the projects to another partition, but it still continued to happen. Then I decided to try moving the punch-in point to a slightly different spot, and the errors stopped!

This is concerning to me, as my drive should be fairly "frag-free", having recently formatted. Anyone else experience this? What can be done to prevent?

Perhaps the issue is specific to something such as the punch-in process itself.

Although you most likely have the 80 GB drive that only has a 2MB buffer, I'm not 100% sure that it's a large enough buffer during a punch-in process.

Remember, the transport is basically in play mode, then immediately thrown into record. If the drive doesn't have immediate access to free disk space, it can't write the new incoming data. Hence the 'Drive Busy' error.

This was actually an issue with the original IBM 40GV series hard drives being out of spec, and Roland had to code around this problem. It was incorporated into version 2.009.

However, I'm not completely sure how that code fix works in conjunction with the Maxtor 80GB drives that ship in the US on the 2480CD.

I can make any Roland supported drive go into 'Drive Busy' mode on the 2480, but it always requires some high intensity punch-ins and punch-outs that span multiple tracks before it happens.

Is this a project that was recorded on another machine first (IE:880, 1680, etc), or on an earlier version of the 2480's OS than 2.009?

I have a similar issue. I have the Maxtor 80gb drive with the 8mb cache. It runs fine, but there is one song on a recent project I did for a customer that displays the "drive busy" message at the very end of the song. Song plays fine otherwise. I've moved it off to CD backup and back, I've optimized it, I've reformatted the drive, copied to a different partition and moved it back, and it still does it. Odd thing is that it's the only song that does this.

I run my machine fairly hard. It's not unusual to have 60-80hrs on a typical 10-12 song project with a bunch of vocals, so I format the drive often to avoid this type of thing. Yet this one tune continues to "drive busy", even after being optimized...

The project(s?) that this happened on were originally recorded on my 2480CD, OS version 2.11.

I have not noticed any difference between manual and auto-punches. I was only using auto-punch during this problem, did not try manually punching. What's the difference?

I have often noticed (on many projects) that the length of the "blip", or audible lack of sound, during punch in AND out points can vary somewhat drastically.

As I mentioned in the first post, my "fix" was to slightly move the punch-in point. It was maybe only a couple frames, but it worked.

I am fairly technically knowledgeable myself, though I don't think quite at your level, but I have spent no time at all trying to understand the real workings of this machine. However, my gut instinct here is that at certain times during playback, there is a lot of residual data, making the machine work harder, despite optimize, etc. Just kinda odd, considering that there were maybe a total of 15 tracks actually playing back at that moment, and the punch was only on one record-armed track. Guess I'll just continue to use my work-around???????

Oh yeah, I've also experienced the same thing as Tommy seems to have happening, with certain songs hitting "drive busy" at the end, sometimes WELL after all of the recorded data has ended. Weird.

Question:Is it less hard on the machine to keep recording over the same spot until the goal is achieved, or to undo each time and re-record?